Having 4 children has been a crash course in the deep dynamics of emotional regulation. It takes effort to understand why some things make me so angry. Spilled milk, sibling spats, hitting, name-calling, dawdling unbearably when we have to be somewhere, these irritations leave me (relatively, I have bad days) unruffled and serene. 

Then there are the behaviors that send me straight into my reptilian brain, all rationality discarded. Psychologists claim that anger addles our thinking and makes us unable to function in a normal way, much like alcohol. This type of anger is described as “flipping your lid” and it is meant in an almost literal sense. When we descend into our lower, reptilian, “automatic” brain we lose access to our upper brain (the lid) where reason, rationality, patience, and empathy reside.

Anger sends us downstairs. The key to avoiding an emotional free fall to the bottom is recognizing triggers. What triggers automatic emotional shutdowns? It depends on the person.

Mine are easy and big. Sass and sneakiness. Control freak that I am, and raised by a military father who had little patience for smart retorts or broken rules, it isn’t hard to understand why. 

Nor is it hard to understand how fast I lost it when I walked downstairs a few mornings ago to the sound of desperate shuffling from the vicinity of my daughter’s desk. 

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Nothing.” She reeked of guilt. I stood there staring, noticing the crumbs on the desk and her panicked, big-eyed stare. It was only 7:00 a.m., my small children are allowed to come downstairs and play while I get dressed; they are never allowed to mess around in the kitchen without asking. I’ve arrived downstairs to find the gas stove on and leaking merrily into the house. It’s a hard-line rule. The lizard in my lower brain blinked its sleepy eyes.

“Are you sure? Because I’m about to search your desk and lying is going to be a problem.”

“Nothing.”

In seconds, I found the impressive stash of Cheetos she’d been munching before breakfast. In another minute or so, I claw my way, tooth and nail, out of the maw of the livid lizard living at the bottom of my brain.

Triggers fired all over the place. Why does it make me so ragey? Control? Yes. A rational rule based on past dangerous behavior broken? Yes. Feeling tricked and manipulated?  Some. Do I fear she’ll be stealing Cheetos from convenience stores at eleven? No. The fear is different—that we will lose our foundation of trust, that I will expect lies and manipulation, rather than truth and negotiation, and we will be caught in the endless teenage years in a mother-daughter vortex of rules broken, consequences, rage, and “unfairness.” I can hear it a decade from now. 

“YOU NEVER LET ME DO ANYTHING!!!!”

“YOU NEVER SHOW ME I CAN TRUST YOU TO BE SMART AND SAFE!!!”

Want to know the punch line? I was a sneaky child. A clever, straight-Aed, sneaky, manipulative teenager. I could have gotten myself killed several times and I managed to live to tell the tale. 

Standing before my daughter and her hoard of morning Cheetos, I took a deep breath and slammed the lid on my lizard brain and its vicious yelling tantrum. “So, you know you’re not supposed to be in the kitchen until I come downstairs. And you lied. Those are not okay. For now, you’ve chosen your breakfast.  Come and get a bowl and take them to the table.”

Don’t feel too proud of me. The lizard is definitely ahead on my life scoreboard.

She cried into her Cheetos while we ate pancakes and syrup. Extra syrup. Okay, maybe I still had a toe in my lower brain. The next morning, my sweet daughter bounded into the hall, ready for the day, and I called sadly: “You’ll have to wait on your bed until I’m ready. I can’t trust you to stay out of the kitchen. You can have another chance in a few weeks.”

I expected a screaming fit, but I heard only slow, stomping footsteps back to her room. I wanted to cheer. I have to trust her to listen to rules and come to me before she does something dumb. But to be fair, she has to trust me to stay out of my brain basement when she screws up. 

I took my sweet time getting ready for the day. What can I say? I have a forked tongue.